Once Upon a Time in Harlem is a monumental work of art.
Photo: Courtesy of Sundance Institute
There is at least one truly monumental work of art premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and it represents the culmination of a five-decade long journey. In 1972, the filmmaker William Greaves invited just about every surviving figure from the Harlem Renaissance to a cocktail party at Duke Ellington’s home to discuss the history and legacy of that period. With three cameras, Greaves filmed the entire event, hoping to use it in a Harlem Renaissance documentary whose shape he did not fully have in mind yet. He worked with this footage off and on for the rest of his life, screening work-in-progress excerpts at various venues, until the film became something of a legendary dream project. Greaves died in 2014, but the efforts to complete his picture lived on. Now it’s here, finished by his son David Greaves (who had been one of the cameramen at the event and worked closely with his father throughout his career).
It’s a remarkable gathering, not just because of all the luminaries attending, but because of the sheer vitality of their engagement. Many of these people haven’t seen each other in decades, and they’re all senior citizens, but they’re clearly animated by the subject of the Harlem Renaissance, in part because its legacy is so open to interpretation. Ida Mae Cullen, widow of the poet Countee Cullen, observes that people at the time often misdated the Renaissance to the 1930s, but that it in fact began in the 1920s. There are debates about whether the Renaissance represented a specific time period, or whether it kept going. The poet Arna Bontemps (who was to die just one year later later) calls the period “a sort of prism reflecting all of the Black experience from the beginnings to the present,” that it redefined what came before and influenced everything that came after.
Everybody has a take, it seems, and some of them clash with others’ views. One of the guests is the writer George Schuyler, who by this point had become a Goldwater-voting arch-conservative, and it’s fun watching some of the others responding to his provocations. What comes through most vividly is the extent to which everybody is personally invested in the legacy of the period. Ida Mae Cullen expresses frustration that nobody has mentioned Countee. The legendary society columnist Gerri Major recalls being spat on by a white man at the Cotton Club, of all places. People remember the artists who died young. They go back and forth over the politics, the literature, all the magazines and papers that published the work, the librarians who gave these young poets and authors places to write. They talk about the relative influence of African art on the Harlem Renaissance, and about Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement. And of course they talk about the social forces and outrages that fed the Renaissance — the racism and violence all over the country that pushed people to Harlem in the first place.
The footage has been edited with fluidity and grace. The film doesn’t assume total knowledge on the part of the viewer. There is archival material interspersed throughout, including snippets of poetry and shots of key paintings. But it all flows so naturally. Early on, the photographer James Van Der Zee sits at a piano, noting that his first love was music, and that he wound up being a photographer in order to pay the bills. Then, he starts to play a lyrical tune, while some of his pictures appear on the screen. In one of the film’s many highpoints, the 79-year-old socialist and civil rights activist Richard B. Moore gives an impassioned, impromptu reading of Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” from memory. Not long after that, Leigh Whipper, the 95-year-old co-founder of the Negro Actors Guild of America, recites the entirety of the speech he read as Haile Selassie in the 1943 film Mission to Moscow, complete with accent. The past doesn’t seem all that far away to these men.
Watching this film in 2026, we might feel a twinge of longing for the warmth of such gatherings. It feels like a nostalgic blast from a time when people actually came together and talked about things, even argued passionately with each other about them. But such warmth wouldn’t come through if the footage itself didn’t reflect it. To put it another way: William Greaves knew how to shoot a party. The verite camera closes in on subjects, or pans back and forth, or roams the crowd. The conversation doesn’t feel structured, but it has a definite, organic shape. At first, the participants are slightly more formal towards each other, but as the night wears on, they’re freer, more combative, but also more cheerful. The director is, too. We se a bit more of Greaves as the party continues, at times even trying to push the conversation in certain directions. Someone bumps a microphone to slate a shot. A voice chimes in offscreen to tell us who just spoke. The artifice reveals itself, almost as if Greaves himself is becoming freer with the material.
William Greaves did actually make a very good short documentary about the Harlem Renaissance in 1974 called From These Roots, which was built entirely out of archival materials, still images and newsreel films. (You can see that here.) He had hoped to incorporate some of that 1972 gathering for that movie. But it’s not hard to see why he became separately obsessed with the Once Upon a Time in Harlem project. Not only is the party footage remarkable, it also feels like something that might have looked different to him every time he revisited it.
Greaves produced an enormous body of work over his career, but he might best be known for Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, an experimental hybrid film shot in 1968 in which an ostensible scene audition in Central Park between some actors is shot by one film crew, while that crew is being shot by another crew, with yet a third crew also filming things; each level of the picture seems to explore another layer of meaning, as if in an attempt to open what William Blake called “the doors of perception.” In its own way, Once Upon a Time in Harlem feels like another such effort, with each part of the conversation opening up new ways of seeing the Harlem Renaissance. We imagine the director coming back to this footage over the years, looking back on these scenes of these men and women looking back, the present always alive yet inexorably slipping further away. And now we have this masterpiece, finished by David Greaves, which also works as a portrait of and tribute to his father, adding yet another level.
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